Millions of people, most of them in Georgia, continued to be under a tornado warning and thousands were without power on Wednesday morning, after large hail and strong winds uprooted swept through the Ohio Valley and moved east on Tuesday.
Early Wednesday, more than 200,000 customers were without power in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Kentucky and Georgia, according to Poweroutage.us, a site that tracks outages. The majority were in West Virginia, with more than 100,000 reported to be without power.
On Tuesday evening, there were reports of tornadoes in Georgia, Illinois, Tennessee, Ohio and in Kentucky, according to the National Weather Service. There was one storm-related death in Oklahoma, the Tulsa Police Department said, but it did not provide further details.
In Conyers, Ga., a tornado downed multiple trees and power lines early Wednesday, said Dan Morgan, the director of Rockdale County Emergency Management Agency. The tornado in an Atlanta suburb was confirmed by radar just after midnight, said Nikole Listemaa, a senior forecaster at the National Weather Service office serving Atlanta.
The severe weather was part of a powerful storm system that was moving east after hitting parts of Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas on Monday.
As of 4 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday morning, almost 3 million people remained ” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>under a tornado watch, according to the National Weather Service.
Kentucky had declared a state of emergency because of the severe weather.
“We have reports of substantial damage to a number of structures — and, thankfully, as of right now, we are not aware of any fatalities,” Gov. Andy Beshear said in a statement.
Weather officials encouraged people living in areas where a tornado watches escalated to tornado warnings to move to a safe place, such as a basement or the interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building.
Forecasters on Monday had also faced an outage that affected a key part of the nation’s weather tracking system, potentially making it harder for them to warn people about the severe weather. The service had returned to normal by 6:30 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday.
Forecasters expected the storm system to move into New England on Wednesday and Thursday. More than 6 million people were under a winter storm warning on Wednesday morning, many of them in New England, according to forecasters. Boston will probably face heavy rain, river flooding, wet snow and strong winds on Wednesday and Thursday.
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